Sound interesting, there are lots of different elements you could include with puzzle RPGs, so I'll be quite interested to see what all kind of mechanics you come up with.

Thanks! I have some really good core puzzle ideas that I came up with a day or so after I posted the topic, so now I'll have a better idea of what to do with the mechanics now.



Here's my new progress! You can see that all the "event" tiles, or puzzle mechanics, are displayed onscreen. I also implemented button and door behaviors, with framework to do the same thing for each tile. I also did a lot of work on the map toolchain, making it so that each program can be compiled with the same header file(s), meaning no extra bloat in the build directory, among other changes like always displaying event tiles there too.

Well.. I only get this one error:

Quote

Unresolved reference to 'OSdequeue'.

That usually signifies a missing -l(library) argument, forgetting to #include something, not having the library files in the right places, or the PATH variables being wrong. Try any of those things and you'll probably fix it.

Well, I've done it; I've finally released Sorcery of Uvutu PC! It's released under v1.0. I'll give you what did change between the release candidates, and then I'll talk about plans for the future. All download links and promotion material can be found in the original post, and in this one.

Right now, Sorcery of Uvutu is confirmed to work on Windows; both as a prebuilt executable, and as a self-built package. Unfortunately, all of my attempts to test on GNU-based machines have gone awry, so I'm depending on the community to help me on that front. As far as I know, Sorcery of Uvutu PC can't run on Linux, at least not on my Ubuntu VM, and another user confirmed issues. Not if it was compiled by the machine, anyways. I attempted to get Wine to work, but unfortunately it is too large to download to my VM, so I need to increase the space, but long story short I wiped the machine to reset it. I'm not sure how much space it needs, but a lot is already taken up by my stuff on the Windows side of the machine, so I don't know how much I have to spare. Again, the same user who reported issues with the Linux binaries found that the pre-buitl verison worked with Wine, although to what extent remains to be seem. If you can get Sorcery working or understand what the problem is and how to fix it, please, let me know, I'd love to have my project work on as many computers as possible!

Sorcery of Uvutu v1.0, as opposed to the Release Candidate versions, allows players to experience the game past the first world. Of course, this was done to ensure that there were no bugs present in the next worlds, and trust me, there were lots. As for the players who tried the Release Candidate versions, I thank you so much for helping me test and ensuring that various issues were accounted for and fixed accordingly. Unfortunately for the RC testers, if you beat the Plain Plains boss, you will have to create new save files. Why? Because you defeated the first boss, and that makes him go away. In the versions you tested, he never gave you the all-important Teleport Stone to let you progress through the worlds. In essence, you are stuck in World 1. Sorry for this minor inconvenience, but I hope you enjoy the second playthrough of Plain Plains! I'm sure you'll notice this time that the name is not really descriptive of the area; plains don't have lots of trees.

Going forward, I would love to add music. I have a friend who would like to do music, but he's pretty busy right now, so it'll have to come sometime later. On top of that, I'd have to learn the SDL_mixer library, and while that's not as hard as creating a soundtrack, it's nothing to scoff at. As well, I'd love to do a remake version that fixes many of the gameplay and story aspects that a lot said needed work, adds some additional features, and gives new content. Let me know if you're interested in a Director's Cut-esque remake. That being said, I like the original version as it stands, since it's a more accurate representation of the work I did on the CSE and monochrome 84+ versions of the game. This is by far my largest project, in terms of scope of potential player base; of course it should come to represent how much I'm worth as a game creator, but there's a certain aspect of legacy that I like to capture as well. That would be less the focus in a DX remake, but I think it would be all the better for it, giving players different opportunities to experience my vision in a more unrestricted sense. However, despite the insistence I have on keeping Sorcery PC mostly identical to the original TI calculator releases, I hope you find that it's great and unique!

As for other projects, now that Sorcery is complete, I have a couple ideas for new projects. Stay tuned for any announcements if you like my work, but the theme here will likely be remakes. If you're familiar with my work when I first started programming on the calculators, then you will love to hear what I've got brewing. I plan on having something playable (or at least worthy of a screenshot sent around on IRC) decently soon, although at this point I'm probably going to take a little break to get the programmer juice flowing again.


Download here: https://github.com/123outerme/Sorcery-of-SDL/releases
Report issues here: https://github.com/123outerme/Sorcery-of-SDL/issues

Oh. So there's also a monochrome version? 68k?
Also, if you are planning to support language packs, i'm willing to do a translation into German, French and Polish.

The monochrome version is for the TI-83+ series, and yes, it's out.
I most likely will be able to support language packs. All of my text is in array literals defined by #defines, so I know there's a way to load the text in, if I redo the way the array literals load. I can start giving you the text I need translated, if you want to get working on that! I can assist with the French translation if necessary (I do know enough French to make basic conversation), but if you're more of a capable French speaker than that, I'm fine with letting you do the translating.

I decided I wanted Sorcery PC to be a little less old-school and a straight port of the CSE version, so I added a lot more visual flare! The opening text fades in from black, the character sprite moves around per-pixel (although still in tile-sized chunks), attacking animations now highlight who's attacking with more style, and more! I updated the OP to include the download links, which I'm now hosting off GitHub instead of Dropbox. Here's the screenshot:

I show the same things off as before, but with a lot more visual style, emphasizing the work I did to make everything pop and feel more lively on a more powerful machine! I figured since I had the space and speed for complicated animations and movement, I figured I might as well put it to good use. I can fine-tune the look of all my animations, so give me some feedback on what you (dis)like!

And strangely, I find myself nearing the end of development for this game sooner than I anticipated. I've added many things that so far it has lacked, including all NPC text, boss quips before your battle, move upgrading, and more. With the completion of the code that makes your teleport Stone, an essential item for game progress, function correctly, it appears it can be played fully, just like the CSE original. However, I could test every single possible interaction to confirm this, or I could do it the more fun way, both for you and for I, and release it into public beta!
Public beta will come soon; just as soon as I confirm that the game builds and runs perfectly fine on machines other than my own. If you'd like to do that (and I'll put a right here when I've found my person -> ), please PM me or highlight me on IRC. All you need, as far as I know, is my distributed package, and a computer. I have custom build scripts for both Windows and Linux (and Mac too, pretty sure the Linux script will work on Mac).

And now, for a screenshot! However, this is different than a normal screenshot, because it's a video, not a gif! Every tool I've used to convert mp4s to gifs either reduce the quality pretty bad, or lower the framerate to ~10 FPS. I decided that neither were acceptable to showing off a soon-to-be-finished product, so I just uploaded the mp4 straight to Youtube!

Update: No screenshot update yet, as most things left don't impact anything visual. I have, however, reworked some code to allow the move upgrader to finally work, and have also finally allowed custom keymapping! The keymapping will be saved in the savefile, but if anyone thinks I should make a config file I'll definitely do that and add some nice other options as well! The default is the layout I've been using, WASD, Space to act as 2nd (aka an Interact button), and Esc to act as Mode (aka the Menu button). However, once I'm done, you'll be able to go to a config menu to change the keymapping to anything you like! Have fun with different keymappings and tune your layout to your desires! Or, at least you better, or I'm gonna ask for some money in exchange for the couple of hours I pondered and worked on it